The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We’re at the bottom of Puget Sound this weekend, the mizzus and me, encamped in a milkhouse we rented next to an old barn not too far from Olympia. Just up the road is the old railroad bed that ran to a jetty five miles north out into Woodard Bay to haul out logs, load them on train cars and pull them to the Weyerhauser Mill in Everett. The barn, the railroad tracks, the wharf, the mill in Everett are all part of history now. So is this milkhouse, presently a cottage on AirBnB.

The farms out here have been parceled to five acre farmettes, mostly horse pastures, a few nurseries, some small gardens, a couple of McMansions and plenty of double wides and modest homes. The agrarian landscape has definitely been downsized, if not lost completely. Our milkhouse now sports Wi-fi and Blu-Ray.

We breakfasted in Olympia at a café I’d eaten at a quarter century ago, half restaurant, half tavern with a cigar bar at the entrance back then. The McMenamin chain has bought it now, refurbished it, prettied it up and charges outrageous prices for eggs and coffee. The hostess who found us waiting at the Please Wait To Be Seated sign five minutes after we arrived informed us we’d be seated in twenty minutes. I guess nostalgia won over impatience so we waited. The food was okay, the coffee was weaker than a 7/11 dispenser in a truck stop franchise. You can profit on history, restorations, reproductions, all that yearning for what has been lost to strip mall America, but it’s a thin veneer, slightly flimsy. Just costs a little more.

I hear tell there’s a hunger in the land to Make America Great Again. Maybe you know what that means but I haven’t got a clue. Bring back the timber? Bring back the salmon runs? Bring back those coal mining jobs, the textile mills, the steel factories? Bring back the family farm and the industrial age? They’re gone, I hate to tell the folks who pine for a new Gilded Age. Go ahead and drive a restored Packard but don’t think Detroit is going to tool up to assembly line them again, I don’t care how much Kool-Aid Trump doles out to the yearning masses.

We’re packing up to leave in an hour. Going back to our old 1915 shack and our hand built twenty-five year old house. Going back to re-imagine our own piece of America. You ask me what made America great once — and I know you didn’t — it was our imagination. It was our optimism that the future could be shaped by that faith in ourselves to transform the world in our image, to create new art, new literature, new music, new dance, new architecture, new businesses, new inventions, new visions. To go boldly forth where none have gone before, to trek the stars. You want the old America, go to a museum. You want America to be great again, stop looking backwards. Turn off the TV, start using your imagination. And for godsake, everybody, stop the whining, stop blaming the other party, stop pointing fingers. Believe in yourself. Think bigger, dream larger, be your own hero and start painting your own life. It may not make this country great again, but it’s a good start.

Here’s my To-Do List for today:

Zip, Nada, Zilch, Nothing

The mizzus and me are going to idle awhile, then we’re going to follow our noses down a few primrose paths, see what the day brings. Yesterday we found a trail down to near where the Sound ends at Budd Inlet and Boston Bay and watched the sun disappear and the moon come up. Herds of ducks were taking flight at dark, headed to some marsh maybe, no longer home.

Most of the world is migratory. The creatures of this earth travel sea to sea, continent to continent, in search of food, of nesting grounds, all following some primal urge to move, to Go, to follow some celestial command to change location. We may not move to the Bering Straits or Tierra del Fuego, but I suspect we’ll shuffle around some. You know, after a few cups of coffee I’m brewing right now, after a little reading, maybe a after a few songs on the guitar I brought along.

We’re not sure when we’ll go home. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not, but when we do I suspect it’ll be ever so slightly different, hopefully a lot different, more like when we came to the shack almost 40 years ago, nervous but adventurous, naïve but ready for something new, more exiles than pioneers, strangers in a strange land, in love with the island, in love with owning our 7 acres of nettles and woods, in love with going back to the land, in love with the beach, in love mostly with each other. The world wasn’t our oyster, it was ours to create. I think, post election, it’s time to do that again.

No, we didn’t create America. And we didn’t elect the first woman president. But I’m not going to plant bitter seeds in our garden, either. Not sure yet exactly what we want to grow next, but we’ll rejoice that we can, that we will, that we’ll harvest a bounty of, if nothing else, love. Don’t ever think that’s the least a person can do.

I’m down in the South Puget Sound taking a little breather from the post-election introspection. Took a walk this morning in the fog-shrouded Mima Mounds. The Mounds are these strange mysterious giant gopher hills nobody really understands how they came into existence. Sure, you could see them as a metaphor about a bigot’s victory, strange upcroppings in the Body Politic, but … let’s not. Let’s just take a walk.

I’m in here by myself, just me and a couple of raptors hovering over their prey in the mist. Sure, another metaphor but for me it’s just a hawk and a some poor rodent who didn’t pay enough attention. When I finally finish off a few miles through the mounds, a sheriff’s cruiser sits parked near my rig, engine running, the deputy sitting with his window down. Just me and the Law now. Sure … but let’s don’t.

Like a lot of you, I may need a 12 step program, but first I’m going to try a 10,000 step one out here on the trails. When a hawk is just a hawk and a mouse is just an unlucky snack, I’ll know I’m on the road to political recovery. Okay … apolitical recovery. What do the AA folks recite? God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I graduated college with a degree in sociology in 1972 so it’s hard for me to let it go. A friend sent me the lyrics to a John Prine song after the election. “Blow up your TV throw away your paper. Go to the country, build you a home.” He and I once left civilization behind and moved awhile to the country together. Didn’t build a house but we hobbled together an outhouse. I think back and realize we maybe were leaving Nixonian America behind then too. Neither of us really went back … but, we aren’t living in Timbuktu either. Still, there’s another song I remember from back then, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’.

Well I came upon a child of God, he was walking along the road
And I asked him tell me where are you going, this he told me:
Said, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm, going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, and set my soul free.

It’s a hard road to travel, I do believe, but a good destination. I’m going to try to get myself back on that road. This election, it’s just a bump in the path.

You’ve probably seen them too by now, eyes rolled back, heads lolling, hands at their sides fingers twitching, wandering aimlessly with no destination, no obvious direction. Their lips are moving but the only sounds aren’t speech, just incomprehensible mutterings, muted sighs, vague exhalations, an occasional stifled sob. Ashen faced, they seem stunned, shocked, survivors of some unseen catastrophe.

You think Zombies. But you know you’ve seen too much bad TV, too many derivative movies about the Undead. No, these are living people, people you know. If there are any people you know anymore.

These are the catatonics from last night’s horrorshow election, the folks who never dreamed their neighbors, their friends, their family members even would vote in … that man. That crass creepy cretin of a human being, the very incarnation of kitsch and excess, a braggart billionaire so lacking in noblesse oblige they can’t wrap their confused heads around the reality. Around ALL reality.

Who knows how long it will take to come down off those evil hallucinogens someone slipped in their Chablis while they were settling in for an enjoyable evening of election returns, canapes balanced on their napkined laps? Who knows when the earth will tilt back onto its proper axis? At the moment there are no more predictions. The unthinkable … yes, the unthinkable. And the impossibility of even trying.

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a week. Maybe, if they could only get a flimsy handle on this, maybe … well, maybe never. The country they lived in is gone now. They will wander its barren landscape knowing they were always strangers in a strange land, a land inhabited by faces seemingly familiar, but only masks. Their homes are gone. Someone has changed the locks. The squatters. The new owners. For the unknowable future, they’re the new refugees, lost in America. Whatever you do, no matter how much you’d like to help, give them a wide berth. They’re beyond all that now.

My fellow Americans, the day of reckoning is finally here! Today is Election Day in the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. With the rest of the world watching, we proudly put our form of democracy on display as an example to follow. We show those totalitarians, those monarchies, those kleptocrats and commies how our model form of government could be theirs as well. How we have winnowed from 350 million citizens the two who can lead the Free World as president of the most powerful country in the history of mankind.

And tonight, the envelope please….

I know, you’ve had a belly full this past year. It’s been a long national nightmare that we never believed was possible, we never dreamed it could go this far, we can’t quite pinch ourselves to full wakefulness. President Donald Trump. I know, you can’t quite say it. You think: the man is a pig. The man is a bully, a womanizer, a philanderer, an ignorant arrogant egomaniac who campaigned only with his wife and kids and no political backers, a huckster whose claim to business savvy and deal making is a façade that covers multiple million dollar bankruptcies that he used to avoid, legally, paying taxes. He’s a racist, a xenophobe, a misogynist, a fraud and a cheat. He’s a liar who doesn’t appear to believe he’s lying. When confronted with the facts he simply repeats the lie. He claims he will throw his opponent in jail if elected. He wants to cancel Saturday Night Live for skewering him. He bans reporters from his rallies if they work for a paper he considers unfair. Like the New York Times. He encourages violence at those same rallies, ridicules the handicapped, finds it disgusting if a Miss Universe contestant gains a few pounds, tells us he’ll sue the pants off the dozen or more women who accuse him of sexual harassment.

This is the man who will Make America Great Again. Who will ban Muslims from entering the country, who will build a Wall, who will renegotiate trade deals, cancel the Iranian nuclear pact, get tough with China. Who admires Putin and declares him a much better leader than Obama. And no, Russia has never — will never — invade Ukraine.

Tonight, my anxious Americans, we will put on display an America we never really acknowledged, the one we kept hidden in the closet. The dark room where we keep our Confederate flags, the KKK, hate crimes, lynchings, sexual abuse, police racism, corporate tax dodges, a widening divide between the rich and poor, minimum wage stagnation, immigration problems, all those embarrassing traits we lock behind that door. The America half of us want to make great again is the America of angry white folks, folks who fear a polyglot melting pot nation of different nationalities and color and religion, all united, all Americans, all hoping to have an equal opportunity in the land of the so-called free, the land of the scared.

I’d like to tell you our long national nightmare will finally be over tonight. That the healing can begin. But you know and I know too, the skeletons in the closet are out now. It’s not just Election Night. It’s Halloween. The spooks and the goblins and the demons are out in the open, during the daytime, in the light of scrutiny. If you think they’re going back into the shadows, think again. No matter who loses tonight … they’re the real winners.